This invention relates to kitchen utensils and more particularly to hand-operated devices for chopping or cutting various foods, such as vegetables, fruits, nuts, and the like.
Instruments for chopping or sectioning foods have heretofore been provided in a multitude of forms and operational characteristics ranging from the simplest and, perhaps, most universal, single-bladed knife to highly specialized devices of limited applicability such as, for example, a bank of taut wires for slicing hard-boiled eggs. A truly universal instrument is of course a virtual impossibility because of the great variety of problems inherent in treating the many different types of foods.
A group of foods possessing common treatment problems may be said to comprise the firm or crisp foods such as, cabbage, celery, lettuce, nuts, apples, etc. Chopping a vegetable like cabbage with a single-bladed knife is not only tedious and somewhat dangerous, but is is also objectionable because the cut or shredded segments tend to scatter undesirably over or off the cutting surface. Efforts to cope with these problems have produced devices with concentric cylindrical chopping blades, but the latter have proved wholly unsatisfactory because of the tendency of the chopped material to cling to and become impacted or wedged between the blades. This necessitated frequent use of a separate prying instrument to unclog the chopping device. Leaving the concentric blades uncovered or open at their tops (as in U.S. Pat. No. 468,893) merely simplified the job of prying loose the impacted chopped materials and also resulted in a scattering of the chopped materials from off the tops of the blades as the device was reciprocated during use. As a result, concentric-blade chopping devices have fallen into disuse despite the otherwise apparent desirability of such structures.
My prior U.S. Pat. No. 3,667,519 issued June 6, 1972 addressed some of these problems but still did not provide the versatility and ease of cleaning which is desirable. The present invention is more versatile and is easier to clean than my prior device.